Mr. Vashon seems to have taken this view of what constitutes the thorough scholar, and has put his theory into practice. All of the productions of his pen show the student and man of literature. But he is not indebted alone to culture, for he possesses genius of no mean order--poetic genius, far superior to many who have written and published volumes. As Dryden said of Shakspeare, "he needed not the spectacles of books to read Nature; he looked inward, and found her there." The same excellence appertains to his poetical description of the beautiful scenery and climate of Hayti, in his "Vincent Ogé." His allusion to Columbus's first visit to the island is full of solemn grandeur:-- "The waves dash brightly on thy shore, Fair island of the southern seas, As bright in joy as when, of yore, They gladly hailed the Genoese-- That daring soul who gave to Spain A world-last trophy of her reign." Our limited space will not permit our giving more of this, or other poems of Mr. Vashon. The following extract from his admirable essay in the _Anglo-African Magazine_, entitled, "The Successive Advances of Astronomy," is characteristic of his prose:-- "The next important step recorded in the annals of astronomy was the effort to reform the calendar by means of the bissextile year. This effort was made at the time when Julius Cæsar was chief pontiff at Rome. It is noteworthy, as being the only valuable contribution made to astronomical science by the Romans; and, even in this matter, Cæsar acted under the guidance of the Grecian astronomer Sosigenes. We are not to suppose, however, that the Romans were totally indifferent to the subject of astronomy. We are informed by Cicero, in his elegant treatise concerning 'Old Age,' that Caius Gallus was accustomed to spend whole days and nights in making observations upon the heavenly bodies, and that he took pleasure in predicting to his friends the eclipses of the sun and moon a long time before they occurred. Besides, in the 'Scipio's Dream' of the same author, we find, in the course of an admirable dissertation upon the immortality of the soul, an account of a terrestrial system, according to which our earth was the central body, around which the concave sphere of the starry heavens revolved; while, in the space between, the Moon, Venus, Mercury, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn moved with retrograde courses, in the order here mentioned. In fact, this system was the one which was afterwards adopted, elaborated, and zealously maintained by the famous Ptolemy of Alexandria, and which has ever since borne his name. To Ptolemy, then, who flourished about the commencement of the second century, the world is indebted for the first complete system of astronomy that secured the approbation of all the learned. This it was enabled to do by the ingenious, although not perfect, explanation which it gave of the planetary movements, by supposing these bodies to move in circles